Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that the Stasi policed East German artists because of their potential dissident and ideological production. In contrast, Cornelia Schleime’s Stasi Series (1993) reveals the secret police’s preoccupation with her domesticity as a sign of her rebellion. For the photo-text series, the artist assigns fourteen excerpts of her Stasi file to as many self-portrait photographs. The images and texts inform each other, providing a biographical sketch of Schleime’s life in two temporalities (the 1980s and 1993) and from two seemingly incommensurate perspectives (the Stasi and her own). The Stasi files document in careful detail Schleime’s private life in the years that immediately preceded her 1984 emigration. Although the truth of these texts is suspect, the artist does not completely discredit them. Rather, she unites her file to her 1993 present by performing its contents in photographs that exhibit both mockery and resignation. This article considers how the artist’s use of her archive reveals as much about the limitations of her Stasi source as it does about her unique perspective as both subject and interpreter. It examines Schleime’s project in relation to contemporary archival and surveillance-oriented art practices to demonstrate how the Stasi Series adds to their concerns over information and power, memory and document, observation and self-representation.

摘要

传统观点认为，斯塔西对东德艺术家的执政是因为他们有潜在的持不同政见者和意识形态的产物。相比之下，Cornelia Schleime的Stasi系列（1993）揭示了秘密警察对她的家事的专注，这是她叛乱的标志。对于照片文字系列，艺术家将自己的Stasi文件的十四段摘录分配给了许多自画像照片。这些图像和文字相互启发，提供了两个时间（1980年代和1993年）和从两个看似不相称的角度（史塔西和她自己的观点）的史莱姆生平传记。史塔西（Stasi）档案详细记录了施莱姆（Schleime）在1984年移居美国之前的私生活。尽管这些文字的真实性令人怀疑，但艺术家并没有完全抹黑它们。相反，她通过在表现出嘲讽和辞职的照片中表现其内容，将档案与她的1993年礼物结合在一起。本文考虑了艺术家如何使用自己的档案库来揭示她的Stasi资料来源的局限性，以及如何揭示其作为主题和解释者的独特视角。它研究了Schleime与当代档案和面向监视的艺术实践有关的项目，以展示Stasi系列增加了他们对信息和功能，内存和文档，观察和自我表示的关注。